Galion's Haunted Brownella Cottage

Do you believe in ghosts? House might change your mind

GALION, Ohio – When I was told Bishop William Brown and his wife Ella, former owners of Galion’s Brownella Cottage, were buried in Fairview Cemetery on the north side of town, the hair went up on the back of my neck. I was reminded of a line in the 1960 film Psycho. Norman Bates’ mother was supposed to be buried in a cemetery, too, but she wasn’t. And judging from a preponderance of the evidence – if evidence is what you can call it – Brown and his wife could still be residing at 201 South Union Street in Galion.

Brownella Cottage, a sprawling structure built in 1885-87, has a well-established reputation as a haunted house. During a recent late-night ghost tour with about a dozen folks from across the state, led by the Galion Historical Society’s Barry and Cathy Moneysmith, the hair went up on the back of my neck several times. I felt a tingling on my lips. And I smelled pipe smoke, even though there were no pipe smokers in the house that night. “We try not to feed people a lot of information because the power of suggestion is so strong,” Barry Moneysmith said. I wasn’t a firm believer in ghosts before visiting Brownella Cottage, and my feelings on the subject haven’t changed. But I’m certainly not a skeptic when it comes to the power of suggestion.

“She’s with us tonight, she’s in there. She’s here. I can sense her. There’s something right here, there’s something right here. It may have attached to us,” Moneysmith said as we walked into the upstairs bedroom of Mary Scranton Bradford, the bishop’s mother-in-law. Moneysmith waved his arms out in front of him as if he were trying to embrace smoke, and as soon as he said he sensed something, so did I.

Visitors to Brownella Cottage very, very rarely see or hear something that can be clearly identified as a ghost, Moneysmith said. What’s detected are presences, with the help of modern technology – motion detectors, electromagnetic meters, little boxes that shoot out webs of cool-looking laser lights.

The night I was at the cottage, the little buttons on my electromagnetic, or K2, detector shot up at least 40 times. At one point, in an upstairs bedroom, they rose in a call-and-response pattern for about five minutes.

“Mary, are you with us?” Moneysmith asked. My K2 meter responded. “Is Bishop Brown with us tonight?” Nothing. “Is your dog named Gypsy?” More feedback from my K2 meter. It was truly, truly spooky.

William Montgomery Brown was born to a poor family in Orrville in 1855. After his father died, Brown’s mother had to ship her kids off to local farms to live. “Willie went with a farmer by the name of Yoder, who treated him poorly. He was never taught to read or write, never attended school, had no friends to play with,” Moneysmith explained. Brown finally made it to elementary school at the age of 16, and later to Kenyon College in Gambier, thanks to a wealthy benefactor, Mary Scranton Bradford, of Cleveland, on the condition that he enter the ministry. Ella was Mary’s adopted daughter. After the two married, Mary had Brownella Cottage built for them as a wedding present.

Brown was later ousted from the Episcopal Church for having communist beliefs; a hammer and sickle are painted on the floor in a long walkway leading to the estate’s study. He died in the cottage on the morning of Halloween in 1937. “They took him downstairs and embalmed him right here in the house. That was normal back then,” Moneysmith said. “My grandfather was a funeral director, and I’ve heard the stories. In the winter you’d just pour the blood outside. You could drive around town and tell where somebody had died because the dogs were all red.”

For the record, I have no reason to believe the Moneysmiths or anyone touring the Brownella Cottage on the night I was there were faking anything. The Moneysmiths can tell of so many occurrences in that spooky old house that it’s reasonable to believe some sort of presence resides there. But as a committed ghost skeptic, I found nothing to change my mind.

Any number of things can set off an electromagnetic detector, from TV, radio and satellite transmissions to static (everyone had their cell phones turned off and it was determined they had little impact on the meters when on).

In the study, Barry Moneysmith asked the bishop’s ghost to turn off a flashlight and it went off, and was then turned back on when the ghost was asked to do that. But I own a flashlight that does that all the time because its battery cap is loose.

A motion detector in a hallway went off for no apparent reason. But I have one of those on my shed that can be set off by the lightest breeze. That same hallway, the Moneysmiths said, has been a focus of much spectral activity this year and on the night of my tour everyone gravitated toward it. But the hallway is long, dark, narrow and exceedingly creepy. Why wouldn’t a ghost hang out there?

To me, more interesting than the question of whether ghosts exist is why so many people are so convinced they do. Organized religion may have no place for them and most of the churchgoers I know scoff at the very notion of ghosts. But it takes a certain amount of faith to believe in something we can’t see or hear.

The Moneysmiths, and many who have spent significant amounts of time at Brownella Cottage, don’t just believe in ghosts, they have proof they’re there. Well, maybe it’s not the kind of proof that can stand up in a court of law. But I certainly can’t prove them wrong.